Cutting-Edge Technology and Age-Old Ethics

A Social Theorist Wonders at the Octuplets Drama

By Thomas J. Burns
Professor of Sociology
University of Oklahoma

While the particulars of the story of a Southern California woman’s birth to octuplets are captivating, it is instructive to step back and consider the larger issues. Amidst the hype, ethical dilemmas present themselves on a number of levels.  The mother and the physicians involved have their own interests, but the society on which the care and nurturance of these children will fall has a stake, if not a voice, as well.

The word ethical itself comes from the Greek ethos.  As Aristotle observed over two millennia ago, the words (logos) and the sentiments (pathos) of discussions have meaning to the extent they are grounded in an ethos of norms, values and beliefs — a way, really, of making sense of an otherwise chaotic world.  Aristotle saw a common ethos underpinning an entire culture.

Two and a half millennia later, we can see similarities, and yet there are profound differences as well. Many or most of these can be traced on a macro level to processes associated with modernity — technological change, huge increases in population, particularly in urban areas, greater concentrations of wealth and influence in fewer hands and environmental degradation to name but a few.  Having grown exponentially at least since the Industrial Revolution, technological change is occurring so rapidly that the ethical systems of the society that would constrain or at least inform that growth seem to lag ever farther behind.

In-vitro fertilization. Photo from National Science Foundation.

Apparently the plan for Nadya Suleman was to implant eight embryos, assuming that the majority would miscarry, but hoping that one or possibly two would be viable enough to go through full gestation and live birth. In case more than one or maybe two had been viable, the standard procedure would have been to do selective abortions on the other live fetuses.

There are, of course, a hundred ways to view this. From (some and probably most) traditional ethical systems, we have a situation of a mother with eight live fetuses, all of whom were conceived in an ‘unethical’ manner; yet by having one or more abortions, she would run afoul of another set of ethical proscriptions. What would be the counsel for the woman who ‘got religion’ after being impregnated but before selectively aborting? Would she not be ‘ethically’ bound to carry the children — all eight of them — to term?

This is more than idle speculation. Some things about the human condition are timeless, and yet some things are new — and it is a potentially catastrophic mistake for a people to confuse which is which. Put another way, the challenge of living effectively in the present and bringing wisdom to preparation for the future necessarily involves some close consideration of the past and the opportunities and constraints it presents to us. On which of a multitude of precedents, none of which are very closely analogous, are such decisions to be made?

Compared with the old stand-bys, traditional religious voices are surprisingly silent on the circus that unfolds its tents around the octuplet drama. Of course, we know that traditional churches spend time and energy teaching and counseling against abortion, but also against any sort of ‘unnatural’ (a concept which arguably is itself a moving target) means of conception. Embryonic implanting in humans does not approach anything even remotely close to being natural by most normative definitions of that concept, and yet the technology has been developed to make it a reality.

The octuplets case is but one exemplar of things to come. The larger issue here is that technology is changing so rapidly that we are confused about which ethical principles apply. I suspect the dehision will only get larger with time. Citizens will do well to give thought to what an emergent ethic might look like. What of traditional ways apply, and under what conditions? What does it take to embrace complexity sufficiently to develop an ethic that addresses the dilemmas of modernity/postmodernity, even while honoring the traditions that have guided us thus far, however inadequately?

As a somewhat analogous process, consider copyright law, which developed over centuries and, for the most part and with some exceptions, worked fairly well.  With the coming of the Internet and its ability to send messages across lines of traditional political boundaries with a few keystrokes, a whole set of problems arose with copyright law. Some of these issues are, of course, still being worked out. Traditional legal principles such as rights pertaining to intellectual property still apply. Yet for the principles to work properly in the 21st century and beyond, there needed to be some accommodation to the realities that emerged beyond what the original framers of the laws could have imagined in preceding centuries.

To have ignored the development of the Internet would have been irresponsible and probably would have invited chaos.  And yet that would not be totally unrelated to what is happening now with a number of ecological and bioethical issues, several of which are at the forefront of the popular culture now, courtesy of the octuplets drama.

The physicians and laboratory workers presumably will go on doing what they have been doing, bringing the technology perhaps to even more elaborate levels.  If octuplets are possible, why not go for the record? Market the rights!  Make a TV miniseries!

Yes, they are technical experts, and technology has come to the point where experts are the ones who understand how it works well enough to make it work.  That does not qualify them, however, to make ethical discernments about it any more than, say, an auto mechanic should be making privileged decisions about who can drive.

Although there are legal issues that need to be addressed, this opens a broader set of concerns. Who are we and what sorts of ethical systems will we be guided by, if any?

Some broader issues will insist on being addressed soon as well as later.  Who, for example, will take responsibility for the kids?  Someone will wind up footing the bill for the hospital and natal care, which already is well into the millions. Care and feeding of those eight children and the other six the mother already had will fall on somebody.

The average folk lag ever farther behind the breathless pace of progress, which is pushed not by leaders with vision, but simply by those who can by virtue of some narrow technical skill.  The system as it now works facilitates such things.

To ignore these issues is to invite more of the same and, as technology develops, to enable things even more extreme.  The default is an option — just not a particularly good one.  I am thinking we can do better.